NPSTC Report: Priority & Quality of Service for Public Safety in the NPSBN

Date: 2015-08-19

The National Public Safety Telecommunications Council (NPSTC) presents this report on public safety priority and quality of service (PQoS) needs and use cases for the 700 MHz Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network (NPSBN). This new 95-page document, constructed through a collaborative effort between public safety users, government representatives, and members from industry is an update of a report originally issued in 2012.

Public safety needs effective system design and policy that meets the day-to-day needs of public safety entities, but that can also respond flexibly to user needs as incidents grow in severity.

Public safety presents a number of unprecedented prioritization challenges for the NPSBN. First, the NPSBN will be simultaneously shared by many different types of users (e.g., police, fire, EMS, secondary use, etc.) and these various user types have, in many cases, overlapping jurisdictional areas (e.g., federal, state, county, local). Second, all types of applications (e.g., voice, data, video) now share a common set of resources. Third, public safety operations are dynamic and it is difficult to assign a single priority to a responder that will meet all their operational needs. These challenges necessitate a disciplined and rigorous approach to the definition of a PQoS Framework suitable for nationwide interoperability and public safety.

With substantial support from public safety, the U.S. Congress has identified 3GPP Long-Term Evolution (LTE) as the access network technology for the NPSBN. This report is based on LTE as the public safety technology of choice. Where there is broad consensus on an LTE feature that is appropriate to a given need, this report identifies that feature and suggests an approach that meets the need; however, specific implementation details are intentionally omitted. The report captures key needs that will allow LTE technology to complement the existing public safety workflow and not detract responders from their mission.